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Pickpocketing Love Letters

“If you are reading this then you are directly linked to the moment I decided A was incredible, amazing and worth keeping, I’ll let you know how it goes, x T”.

These were the heartfelt words I came across with a friend, hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper and stuffed into one of the tweed jacket pockets covering the window bench in Mitchell’s Deli on Market Street. We stumbled across this love letter with curiosity and delight, whilst having a lazy Sunday brunch in the last week of term, and inadvertently became part of something bigger.

Another couple had written on the back asking how everything had turned out and we felt it our duty to record our part in the story as well. After pestering the waitresses for a pen, we scribbled a “Good luck” on the back with our names and the date.

The letter may not have been written by Dylan Thomas or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but this scrap of paper is a modern day love letter, which sat patiently waiting to be found and shared, just as its author intended. We couldn’t help but wonder about when the letter was written. Were they having coffee together one day and he happened to look up and in that moment he knew, he felt that this was something real, a feeling he knew he wanted to hold on to?

It’s so beautifully and effortlessly simple. Just an ordinary guy, realising he’s falling in love with the girl across the table from him. He didn’t shout it from the rooftops or hold a stereo beneath her bedroom window. He just wrote a simple little note, hid it in a coat pocket and left it to be discovered. It’s proof that this kind of gesture really does happen in real life and not just in the movies. A message in a coat pocket is the new letter in a bottle.

So, to A (note: that’s not actually her real name, I changed it because this is St Andrews and it is all too easy to put two-and-two together) I hope T told you how he felt. To T, your update is eagerly awaited, and to Mitchell’s, I apologise in advance for the confusing surge in customers requesting to sit by the window.